Flower achieves more than just thumbs up for ‘different’ and ‘beautiful’. It builds on fundamental ideas that bring a refreshing perspective to game design.

Flower plays like a game version of the famous Bravia TV ads; you swoop around bringing the joy of color to a world that lacks it. By taking the role of the wind, your goal is to pollinate flowers and help them bloom, with every pass over the hills awakening pockets of life. Flower’s tilt-and-go controls are extremely basic and immediately satisfying, allowing players to master them quickly while contributing to its purity of purpose. The experience is short and sweet — taking only a few hours to finish — but engaging for every second and never repeating itself. It’s a welcome slice of artful originality in a world of games racing to out-refine a handful of the same old premises.

The review in brief pretty much ends there. This is a dazzling burst of a game, and highly recommended to any PS3 owner. But Flower achieves more than just thumbs up for ‘different’ and ‘beautiful’. It builds on fundamental ideas that bring a refreshing perspective to game design.

Flower’s most groundbreaking accomplishment is a sense of movement that’s somehow both exhilarating and calming at the same time. Playing as the wind, whipping along the grass to gather petals, the action feels as thrilling as riding an invisible speeder bike — a petal-stream version of our childhood dreams of racing through the forests of Endor. And yet the serene backdrops and soft orchestral sounds are as soothing as sitting down to admire the natural beauty of a national park. The fact that there’s no danger of doing it wrong makes this paradox possible: you can’t be hurt or die or lose in Flower. If you miss something, you can always just loop back and take another pass. And with a game this gorgeous, you’d almost rather spend the extra time soaking in every corner of its world than race through once on a single perfect path.

In games, as in life, so much excitement is born out of risk or fear. Snowboarding is exciting because we could lose control at any minute. Roller coasters are exciting because they simulate plunging to our deaths. Sports make our stomachs clench when our team is on the brink of defeat. An overwhelming majority of games rely on tension born out of danger, using the chance of death or loss to get our adrenaline flowing. Flower does something rare by giving players a rush despite lacking a fail state. By enabling a joyful sense of flight without the complementary fear of falling, it brings us closer to the natural motion of the birds we all wish we could experience. This is no small feat.

Similarly, the game as a whole sidesteps the adversarial nature of most of its peers, in which you are an ostensibly ‘good’ character trying to defeat evil. In contrast, Flower tells a story that isn’t this or that when it comes to nature versus civilization, urban versus pastoral. The city is not the enemy, a scourge to be vanquished by the righteous force of nature. The goal is balance between the two: a place where light and color are welcomed instead of drowned out, and flora and fauna coexist with forward progress.

The game culminates with its most exciting and uplifting sequence, a breathtaking swirl of color and motion as you speed along highways and down avenues literally changing the world. Each turn brings life to the drab cityscape, transforming municipal grays into bright and vital hues. The final note of the story, if it can be called that, seems to be that the flowers’ dream you spend the game inhabiting is in fact possible, if only we recognize the value of harmony. You finish feeling rejuvenated and at peace — just like the world you’ve traveled across to revive — in a way no other game this year is likely to match.

Flower’s single problem (other than the fact you don’t want it to end) is such a minor detail it seems silly to discuss, if not for the fact that it undermines the whole wonderful experience that comes before. The one game-like element built into the otherwise poetic flow of the game is a series of secret special flowers, three per stage. If you haven’t found them all, finishing the final level returns you to the home screen/apartment as a bright, welcoming urban dwelling, in line with the apparent moral of the game’s closing scenes. But, if you return to the levels to collect all their secret blossoms, your apartment transforms. It’s now depicted as a country home, opening on to a pasture of flowers with no other human presence on the horizon, and the in-game trophy for doing this is labeled ‘Dream’, implying this is the flowers’ genuine wish. This small quirk runs counter to the message of the game’s climax: instead of the ideal state being a balance of man and nature, the ‘true’ ideal held up is suddenly a life on Walden pond. As a city dweller who would love more parks and trees, but is in no rush to take up farming, the sudden switch was a disappointing moment to end on.

As frustrating as that final twist may be in understanding the meaning of Flower, let us at least give thanks that more games are being made with any meaning at all, much less ones worth being absorbed and discussed. And however you feel about its particular message, we are all better off for having a game that makes us feel something this different.

A few footnotes:

There are a few interesting video segments with thatgamecompany co-founder and Flower co-creator Jenova Chen over at Gamespot worth checking out. His explanation of their design philosophy makes it obvious why they’re such a special studio.

From their site, TGC’s mission: “At TGC (thatgamecompany) our goal is to make commercial video games that communicate different emotional experiences the current video game market is not offering. We encourage innovation and experimentation and believe that our creative games will appeal to new, yet untapped, audiences.” Admirable, no?

Chris Suellentrop’s Slate review was also right on the money, and Area 5’s Co-op segment on Flower sums it up nicely with lots of pretty footage to go with it.